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Mary's Minute: My Inner Circle

The other day, I received an email with a promising subject line: CREATE AN INNER CIRCLE. For those of you who don't know, I'm kind of in love with Sarah J. Maas's A Court of Mist and Fury (I like books 1 & 3 too, but ACOMAF is by far my favorite), and one of the reasons I love it so much is because of the close-knit group of friends the main character Feyre makes. For a second, I though it was a promo email from Bloomsbury, and I was super excited! Unfortunately, the email was some super preachy spam email with lots of Bible references so... not at all what I expected.

However, the idea of building my own Inner Circle is an intriguing one so I have decided to go ahead and make my own Inner Circle so thanks for the idea, Myra Perry, whoever you are! As a matter of fact, I like this idea SO MUCH that I'm going to create TWO Inner Circles: a list of fictional characters who I would want in my theoretical Inner Circle and a list of IRL actual humans who already are because if there's anything I like, it's talking up books I love and bragging about my friends!

Fictional Character Inner Circle

Before you check out my picks, I just want to say that I ADORE Feyre, Rhys, Mor, Cassian, Azriel, and Amren, the six in the ACOTAR Inner Circle, and obviously I want them all. However, as I tried my hardest to pick individuals and not entire groups and the actual Inner Circle is at its best when they're all together, I gave myself the rule that I couldn't use any of them. Same with other large groups of characters. Otherwise I'd just end up with an Inner Circle that would be entirely comprised of entire casts like TLC + the Dregs + the Inner Circle + all the Starbound & Illuminae groups + the Cullens + everyone from Vampire Academy and Bloodlines etc.

Nina Zenik. I want the heartrender from Six of Crows on my list for several reasons: 1. she's a HEARTRENDER, hello! 2. She's got a great sense of humor. 3. Waffles. 4. She comes with friends who will totally end up part of my Inner Circle (welcome, Inej & Matthias!). 5. I love her!

Also part of my fictional Inner Circle is Levi from Fangirl. I adore this actual Good Guy. He's sweet, he's adorable, he's kind, he's chivalrous without being patronizing, and he makes me laugh.

Tarver Merendsen is a broody soldier, but he's in my Inner Circle because he would be the one keeping all of us alive! He's great at his job, but he has the heart of a poet. Plus, as much as I love him, like Nina, he'd also come with friends: notably, his debutant-computer-programmer girlfriend Lilac. And Lilac and I would totally be shopping buddies. I mean, girl's got style for days!

Absolutely invited to the party is Susannah Simon, commonly known as Suze, from the Mediator series. Suze is a tough chick. She's not afraid to kick some serious ghost butt on a regular basis OR the occasional human butt when living flesh-and-blood people get in her way. Also, she would absolutely go shopping with me and Lilac.

Actual Real Life Inner Circle

First of all, my fantasy football league Game of Throws ladies: Lindsay (aka Bookie Crumbles aka cookie goddess aka our commish), Wendy (of Book Scents), Ellice (of Paper Riot), Jess (of Gone with the Word), Andi (of Andi's ABCs), Tonya (of Lily Bloom Books), Lauren (of Bookmark Lit), Morgan (of The Bookish Beagle), and Danielle (formerly of Love At First Page aka the triangle hater). These ladies are My People. We came together because of a mutual love of books and football, and we stay together because we're way too freaking weird to unleash our full selves on the general populace (I'm.... only partially kidding). We laugh, we cry, we tell weird jokes and gossip and rant about fandoms and Marvel and hot guys and books and food and diets and exercise and family and friends and jobs and being moms being wives being single basically every single thing. The group DMs (because of COURSe we have multiple group DMs for each of our fandoms in addition to the main chat :D) smart, talented, loving, kind, hilarious, ridiculous, amazing women has become my one-stop-sanity-shop when I need a pick-me-up or just to talk, and I am absurdly lucky to have each and every one of them in my life.

Then there's Jessica of Stuck In Books, who is my most-frequent IRL Inner Circle member. Jess and I live about 3.5 hours apart, but we see each other as much as possible, which is fairly often considering all the book events in Texas. Jess and I are those friends who can start a conversation in one place (like Twitter) and seamlessly transition that conversation to Instagram, Twitter DMs, text, Instagram stories, and Instagram DMs and then switch back-and-forth indefinitely but also manage to keep track of rants and stories that require being shared in-person because there's no other way to appreciate it. We're kind of brain twins, but that doesn't mean we always think exactly alike or share the same opinion. Jess is the kind of friend who always tells me the truth, even the difficult ones, and always thoughtfully responds to my comments. She's the Inej to my Nina, and I love her, and I'm already counting down the 27 19 days until I get to see her next! (I wrote this post last week & needed to edit :D)

Lastly, there's Katie from the Polished Page Turners. Have you ever met someone and just thought, "Yeah, this is my person" because they get you and you get them & you just... click? That's Katie. She's fantastic, and I love her to pieces. I'm so glad that a mutual love of soccer, sports romance books, and Rob Conrad from As Long As You Love Me brought us together! I wish desperately that we lived closer to one another because she's SO much fun to hang out with in person. We've had some amazing adventures together, despite the fact that my family once though that Katie was a serial killer I'd met on the internet (lolz), and I can't wait until the next one, whatever city it may be in. Here's to good food, taking absurd selfies, and smacking down badly behaving jerks at RT, Katue! ;)

So my question for you is: who would be in your Inner Circle? Feel free to share some of your favorite fictional characters or give a shout out to IRL awesome people. :)

This is an excellent blog post idea and I'd love it if other blogs jumped on and tried it too. My fictional inner circle would have Kady and Ezra from Illuminae (I need smart, quick-thinking, solid people around me that also have a sarcastic flair) as well as Grant and Wil from Summer of Supernovas (Grant is pure gentleman and Wil, even though she is a planner, she still is willing to take risks).

YES, Kady and Ezra! Love those two crazy kids. I had to create some limits on myself or I would have ended up with an "inner circle" of about 100 characters so I said one character per author. If I'd gone up to 10, Kady absolutely would have made the cut (but then I'd also want Ezra and AIDAN and Nik and Hanna and Ella and...).